And the Mountains Echoed

This book is dedicated to Haris and Farah,
both the noor of my eyes, and to my father,

who would have been proud

For Elaine

Out beyond ideas
of wrongdoing and rightdoing,
there is a field.
I’ll meet you there.
—JELALUDDIN RUMI, 13th century

Contents

One, Fall 1952
Two, Fall 1952
Three, Spring 1949
Four
Five, Spring 2003
Six, February 1974
Seven, Summer 2009
Eight, Fall 2010
Nine, Winter 2010
Acknowledgments
Also by Khaled Hosseini

One
Fall 1952

So, then. You want a story and I will tell you one. But just the one. Don’t either of you ask me
for more. It’s late, and we have a long day of travel ahead of us, Pari, you and I. You will need
your sleep tonight. And you too, Abdullah. I am counting on you, boy, while your sister and I are
away. So is your mother. Now. One story, then. Listen, both of you, listen well. And don’t
interrupt.

Once upon a time, in the days when divs and jinns and giants roamed the land, there lived a
farmer named Baba Ayub. He lived with his family in a little village by the name of Maidan Sabz.
Because he had a large family to feed, Baba Ayub saw his days consumed by hard work. Every
day, he labored from dawn to sundown, plowing his field and turning the soil and tending to his
meager pistachio trees. At any given moment you could spot him in his field, bent at the waist,
back as curved as the scythe he swung all day. His hands were always callused, and they often
bled, and every night sleep stole him away no sooner than his cheek met the pillow.

I will say that, in this regard, he was hardly alone. Life in Maidan Sabz was hard for all its
inhabitants. There were other, more fortunate villages to the north, in the valleys, with fruit
trees and flowers and pleasant air, and streams that ran with cold, clear water. But Maidan
Sabz was a desolate place, and it didn’t resemble in the slightest the image that its name, Field
of Green, would have you picture. It sat in a flat, dusty plain ringed by a chain of craggy
mountains. The wind was hot, and blew dust in the eyes. Finding water was a daily struggle
because the village wells, even the deep ones, often ran low. Yes, there was a river, but the
villagers had to endure a half-day walk to reach it, and even then its waters flowed muddy all
year round. Now, after ten years of drought, the river too ran shallow. Let’s just say that people
in Maidan Sabz worked twice as hard to eke out half the living.

Still, Baba Ayub counted himself among the fortunate because he had a family that he
cherished above all things. He loved his wife and never raised his voice to her, much less his
hand. He valued her counsel and found genuine pleasure in her companionship. As for children,
he was blessed with as many as a hand has fingers, three sons and two daughters, each of
whom he loved dearly. His daughters were dutiful and kind and of good character and repute.
To his sons he had taught already the value of honesty, courage, friendship, and hard work
without complaint. They obeyed him, as good sons must, and helped their father with his crops.

Though he loved all of his children, Baba Ayub privately had a unique fondness for one among
them, his youngest, Qais, who was three years old. Qais was a little boy with dark blue eyes. He
charmed anyone who met him with his devilish laughter. He was also one of those boys so
bursting with energy that he drained others of theirs. When he learned to walk, he took such
delight in it that he did it all day while he was awake, and then, troublingly, even at night in his
sleep. He would sleepwalk out of the family’s mud house and wander off into the moonlit
darkness. Naturally, his parents worried. What if he fell into a well, or got lost, or, worst of all,
was attacked by one of the creatures lurking the plains at night? They took stabs at many
remedies, none of which worked. In the end, the solution Baba Ayub found was a simple one,
as the best solutions often are: He removed a tiny bell from around the neck of one of his goats
and hung it instead around Qais’s neck. This way, the bell would wake someone if Qais were to
rise in the middle of the night. The sleepwalking stopped after a time, but Qais grew attached

to the bell and refused to part with it. And so, even though it didn’t serve its original use, the
bell remained fastened to the string around the boy’s neck. When Baba Ayub came home after
a long day’s work, Qais would run from the house face-first into his father’s belly, the bell
jingling with each of his tiny steps. Baba Ayub would lift him up and take him into the house,
and Qais would watch with great attention as his father washed up, and then he would sit
beside Baba Ayub at suppertime. After they had eaten, Baba Ayub would sip his tea, watching
his family, picturing a day when all of his children married and gave him children of their own,
when he would be proud patriarch to an even greater brood.

Alas, Abdullah and Pari, Baba Ayub’s days of happiness came to an end.

It happened one day that a div came to Maidan Sabz. As it approached the village from the
direction of the mountains, the earth shook with each of its footfalls. The villagers dropped
their shovels and hoes and axes and scattered. They locked themselves in their homes and
huddled with one another. When the deafening sounds of the div’s footsteps stopped, the
skies over Maidan Sabz darkened with its shadow. It was said that curved horns sprouted from
its head and that coarse black hair covered its shoulders and powerful tail. They said its eyes
shone red. No one knew for sure, you understand, at least no one living: The div ate on the
spot those who dared steal so much as a single glance. Knowing this, the villagers wisely kept
their eyes glued to the ground.

Everyone at the village knew why the div had come. They had heard the tales of its visits to
other villages and they could only marvel at how Maidan Sabz had managed to escape its
attention for so long. Perhaps, they reasoned, the poor, stringent lives they led in Maidan Sabz
had worked in their favor, as their children weren’t as well fed and didn’t have as much meat
on their bones. Even so, their luck had run out at last.

Maidan Sabz trembled and held its breath. Families prayed that the div would bypass their
home for they knew that if the div tapped on their roof, they would have to give it one child.
The div would then toss the child into a sack, sling the sack over its shoulder, and go back the
way it had come. No one would ever see the poor child again. And if a household refused, the
div would take all of its children.

So where did the div take the children to? To its fort, which sat atop a steep mountain. The
div’s fort was very far from Maidan Sabz. Valleys, several deserts, and two mountain chains had
to be cleared before you could reach it. And what sane person would, only to meet death? They
said the fort was full of dungeons where cleavers hung from walls. Meat hooks dangled from
ceilings. They said there were giant skewers and fire pits. They said that if it caught a trespasser,
the div was known to overcome its aversion to adult meat.

I guess you know which rooftop received the div’s dreaded tap. Upon hearing it, Baba Ayub let
an agonized cry escape from his lips, and his wife fainted cold. The children wept with terror,
and also sorrow, because they knew that the loss of one among them was now assured. The
family had until the next dawn to make its offering.

What can I say to you of the anguish that Baba Ayub and his wife suffered that night? No parent
should have to make a choice such as this. Out of the children’s earshot, Baba Ayub and his wife
debated what they should do. They talked and wept and talked and wept. All night, they went
back and forth, and, as dawn neared, they had yet to reach a decision—which was perhaps
what the div wanted, as their indecision would allow it to take five children instead of one. In
the end, Baba Ayub collected from just outside the house five rocks of identical size and shape.

On the face of each he scribbled the name of one child, and when he was done he tossed the
rocks into a burlap sack. When he offered the bag to his wife, she recoiled as though it held a
venomous snake.

“I can’t do it,” she said to her husband, shaking her head. “I cannot be the one to choose. I
couldn’t bear it.”

“Neither could I,” Baba Ayub began to say, but he saw through the window that the sun was
only moments away from peeking over the eastern hills. Time was running short. He gazed
miserably at his five children. A finger had to be cut, to save the hand. He shut his eyes and
withdrew a rock from the sack.

I suppose you also know which rock Baba Ayub happened to pick. When he saw the name on it,
he turned his face heavenward and let out a scream. With a broken heart, he lifted his youngest
son into his arms, and Qais, who had blind trust in his father, happily wrapped his arms around
Baba Ayub’s neck. It wasn’t until Baba Ayub deposited him outside the house and shut the door
that the boy realized what was amiss, and there stood Baba Ayub, eyes squeezed shut, tears
leaking from both, back against the door, as his beloved Qais pounded his small fists on it,
crying for Baba to let him back in, and Baba Ayub stood there, muttering, “Forgive me, forgive
me,” as the ground shook with the div’s footsteps, and his son screeched, and the earth
trembled again and again as the div took its leave from Maidan Sabz, until at last it was gone,
and the earth was still, and all was silence but for Baba Ayub, still weeping and asking Qais for
forgiveness.

Abdullah. Your sister has fallen asleep. Cover her feet with the blanket. There. Good. Maybe I
should stop now. No? You want me to go on? Are you sure, boy? All right.

Where was I? Ah yes. There followed a forty-day mourning period. Every day, neighbors cooked
meals for the family and kept vigil with them. People brought over what offerings they
could—tea, candy, bread, almonds—and they brought as well their condolences and
sympathies. Baba Ayub could hardly bring himself to say so much as a word of thanks. He sat in
a corner, weeping, streams of tears pouring from both eyes as though he meant to end the
village’s streak of droughts with them. You wouldn’t wish his torment and suffering on the
vilest of men.

Several years passed. The droughts continued, and Maidan Sabz fell into even worse poverty.
Several babies died of thirst in their cribs. The wells ran even lower and the river dried, unlike
Baba Ayub’s anguish, a river that swelled and swelled with each passing day. He was of no use
to his family any longer. He didn’t work, didn’t pray, hardly ate. His wife and children pleaded
with him, but it was no good. His remaining sons had to take over his work, for every day Baba
Ayub did nothing but sit at the edge of his field, a lone, wretched figure gazing toward the
mountains. He stopped speaking to the villagers, for he believed they muttered things behind
his back. They said he was a coward for willingly giving away his son. That he was an unfit
father. A real father would have fought the div. He would have died defending his family.

He mentioned this to his wife one night.

“They say no such things,” his wife replied. “No one thinks you are a coward.”

“I can hear them,” he said.

“It is your own voice you are hearing, husband,” she said. She, however, did not tell him that

the villagers did whisper behind his back. And what they whispered was that he’d perhaps
gone mad.

And then one day, he gave them proof. He rose at dawn. Without waking his wife and children,
he stowed a few scraps of bread into a burlap sack, put on his shoes, tied his scythe around his
waist, and set off.

He walked for many, many days. He walked until the sun was a faint red glow in the distance.
Nights, he slept in caves as the wind whistled outside. Or else he slept beside rivers and
beneath trees and among the cover of boulders. He ate his bread, and then he ate what he
could find—wild berries, mushrooms, fish that he caught with his bare hands from
streams—and some days he didn’t eat at all. But still he walked. When passersby asked where
he was going, he told them, and some laughed, some hurried past for fear he was a madman,
and some prayed for him, as they too had lost a child to the div. Baba Ayub kept his head down
and walked. When his shoes fell apart, he fastened them to his feet with strings, and when the
strings tore he pushed forward on bare feet. In this way, he traveled across deserts and valleys
and mountains.

At last he reached the mountain atop which sat the div’s fort. So eager he was to fulfill his
quest that he didn’t rest and immediately began his climb, his clothes shredded, his feet
bloodied, his hair caked with dust, but his resolve unshaken. The jagged rocks ripped his soles.
Hawks pecked at his cheeks when he climbed past their nest. Violent gusts of wind nearly tore
him from the side of the mountain. And still he climbed, from one rock to the next, until at last
he stood before the massive gates of the div’s fort.

Who dares? the div’s voice boomed when Baba Ayub threw a stone at the gates.

Baba Ayub stated his name. “I come from the village of Maidan Sabz,” he said.

Do you have a wish to die? Surely you must, disturbing me in my home! What is your business?

“I have come here to kill you.”

There came a pause from the other side of the gates. And then the gates creaked open, and
there stood the div, looming over Baba Ayub in all of its nightmarish glory.

Have you? it said in a voice thick as thunder.

“Indeed,” Baba Ayub said. “One way or another, one of us dies today.”

It appeared for a moment that the div would swipe Baba Ayub off the ground and finish him
with a single bite of its dagger-sharp teeth. But something made the creature hesitate. It
narrowed its eyes. Perhaps it was the craziness of the old man’s words. Perhaps it was the
man’s appearance, the shredded garb, the bloodied face, the dust that coated him head to toe,
the open sores on his skin. Or perhaps it was that, in the old man’s eyes, the div found not
even a tinge of fear.

Where did you say you came from?

“Maidan Sabz,” said Baba Ayub.

It must be far away, by the look of you, this Maidan Sabz.

“I did not come here to palaver. I came here to—”









































Abdullah looked at her and sensed something alarming in the woman, beneath the makeup and
the perfume and the appeals for sympathy, something deeply splintered. He found himself
thinking of the smoke of Parwana’s cooking, the kitchen shelf cluttered with her jars and
mismatched plates and smudged pots. He missed the mattress he shared with Pari, though it
was dirty, and the jumbles of springs forever threatened to poke through. He missed all of it. He
had never before ached so badly for home.

Mrs. Wahdati slumped back into the seat with a sigh, hugging her purse the way a pregnant
woman might hold her swollen belly.

Uncle Nabi pulled up to a crowded curbside. Across the street, next to a mosque with soaring
minarets, was the bazaar, composed of congested labyrinths of both vaulted and open
alleyways. They strolled through corridors of stalls that sold leather coats, rings with colored
jewels and stones, spices of all kinds, Uncle Nabi in the rear, Mrs. Wahdati and the two of them
in the lead. Now that they were outside, Mrs. Wahdati wore a pair of dark glasses that made
her face look oddly catlike.

Hagglers’ calls echoed everywhere. Music blared from virtually every stall. They walked past
open-fronted shops selling books, radios, lamps, and silver-colored cooking pots. Abdullah saw
a pair of soldiers in dusty boots and dark brown greatcoats, sharing a cigarette, eyeing
everyone with bored indifference.

They stopped by a shoe stall. Mrs. Wahdati rummaged through the rows of shoes displayed on
boxes. Uncle Nabi wandered over to the next stall, hands clasped behind his back, and gave a
down-the-nose look at some old coins.

“How about these?” Mrs. Wahdati said to Pari. She was holding up a new pair of yellow
sneakers.

“They’re so pretty,” Pari said, looking at the shoes with disbelief.

“Let’s try them on.”

Mrs. Wahdati helped Pari slip on the shoes, working the strap and buckle for her. She peered
up at Abdullah over her glasses. “You could use a pair too, I think. I can’t believe you walked all
the way from your village in those sandals.”

Abdullah shook his head and looked away. Down the alleyway, an old man with a ragged beard
and two clubfeet begged passersby.

“Look, Abollah!” Pari raised one foot, then the other. She stomped her feet on the ground,
hopped. Mrs. Wahdati called Uncle Nabi over and told him to walk Pari down the alley, see how
the shoes felt. Uncle Nabi took Pari’s hand and led her up the lane.

Mrs. Wahdati looked down at Abdullah.

“You think I’m a bad person,” she said. “The way I spoke earlier.”

Abdullah watched Pari and Uncle Nabi pass by the old beggar with the clubfeet. The old man
said something to Pari, Pari turned her face up to Uncle Nabi and said something, and Uncle
Nabi tossed the old man a coin.

Abdullah began to cry soundlessly.

“Oh, you sweet boy,” Mrs. Wahdati said, startled. “You poor darling.” She fetched a
handkerchief from her purse and offered it.

Abdullah swiped it away. “Please don’t do it,” he said, his voice cracking.

She hunkered down beside him now, her glasses pushed up on her hair. There was wetness in
her eyes too, and when she dabbed at them with the handkerchief, it came away with black
smudges. “I don’t blame you if you hate me. It’s your right. But—and I don’t expect you to
understand, not now—this is for the best. It really is, Abdullah. It’s for the best. One day you’ll
see.”

Abdullah turned his face up to the sky and wailed just as Pari came skipping back to him, her
eyes dripping with gratitude, her face shining with happiness.

One morning that winter, Father fetched his ax and cut down the giant oak tree.
He had Mullah Shekib’s son, Baitullah, and a few other men help him. No one tried to
intervene. Abdullah stood alongside other boys and watched the men. The very first thing
Father did was take down the swing. He climbed the tree and cut the ropes with a knife. Then
he and the other men hacked away at the thick trunk until late afternoon, when the old tree
finally toppled with a massive groan. Father told Abdullah they needed the firewood for winter.
But he had swung his ax at the old tree with violence, with his jaw firmly set and a cloud over
his face like he couldn’t bear to look at it any longer.

Now, beneath a stone-colored sky, men were striking at the felled trunk, their noses and cheeks
flushed in the cold, their blades echoing hollowly when they hit the wood. Farther up the tree,
Abdullah snapped small branches off the big ones. The first of the winter snow had fallen two
days before. Not heavy, not yet, only a promise of things to come. Soon, winter would descend
on Shadbagh, winter and its icicles and weeklong snowdrifts and winds that cracked the skin on
the back of hands in a minute flat. For now, the white on the ground was scant, pocked from
here to the steep hillsides with pale brown blotches of earth.

Abdullah gathered an armful of slim branches and carried them to a growing communal pile
nearby. He was wearing his new snow boots, gloves, and winter coat. It was secondhand, but
other than the broken zipper, which Father had fixed, it was as good as new—padded, dark
blue, with orange fur lining inside. It had four deep pockets that snapped open and shut and a
quilted hood that tightened around Abdullah’s face when he drew its cords. He pushed back
the hood from his head now and let out a long foggy breath.

The sun was dropping into the horizon. Abdullah could still make out the old windmill, looming
stark and gray over the village’s mud walls. Its blades gave a creaky groan whenever a nippy
gust blew in from the hills. The windmill was home mainly to blue herons in the summer, but
now that winter was here the herons had gone and the crows had moved in. Every morning,
Abdullah awoke to their squawks and harsh croaks.

Something caught his eye, off to his right, on the ground. He walked over to it and knelt down.

A feather. Small. Yellow.

He took off one glove and picked it up.

Tonight they were going to a party, he, his father, and his little half brother Iqbal. Baitullah had

a new infant boy. A motreb would sing for the men, and someone would tap on a tambourine.
There would be tea and warm, freshly baked bread, and shorwa soup with potatoes.
Afterward, Mullah Shekib would dip his finger in a bowl of sweetened water and let the baby
suckle it. He would produce his shiny black stone and his double-edged razor, lift the cloth from
the boy’s midriff. An ordinary ritual. Life rolling on in Shadbagh.

Abdullah turned the feather over in his hand.

I won’t have any crying, Father had said. No crying. I won’t have it.

And there hadn’t been any. No one in the village asked after Pari. No one even spoke her name.
It astonished Abdullah how thoroughly she had vanished from their lives.

Only in Shuja did Abdullah find a reflection of his own grief. The dog turned up at their door
every day. Parwana threw rocks at him. Father went at him with a stick. But he kept returning.
Every night he could be heard whimpering mournfully and every morning they found him lying
by the door, chin on his front paws, blinking up at his assailants with melancholy, unaccusing
eyes. This went on for weeks until one morning Abdullah saw him hobbling toward the hills,
head hung low. No one in Shadbagh had seen him since.

Abdullah pocketed the yellow feather and began walking toward the windmill.

Sometimes, in unguarded moments, he caught Father’s face clouding over, drawn into
confusing shades of emotion. Father looked diminished to him now, stripped of something
essential. He loped sluggishly about the house or else sat in the heat of their big new cast-iron
stove, little Iqbal on his lap, and stared unseeingly into the flames. His voice dragged now in a
way that Abdullah did not remember, as though something weighed on each word he spoke.
He shrank into long silences, his face closed off. He didn’t tell stories anymore, had not told one
since he and Abdullah had returned from Kabul. Maybe, Abdullah thought, Father had sold the
Wahdatis his muse as well.

Gone.

Vanished.

Nothing left.

Nothing said.

Other than these words from Parwana: It had to be her. I am sorry, Abdullah. She had to be the
one.

The finger cut, to save the hand.

He knelt on the ground behind the windmill, at the base of the decaying stone tower. He took
off his gloves and dug at the ground. He thought of her heavy eyebrows and her wide rounded
forehead, her gap-toothed smile. He heard in his head the tinkle of her laughter rolling around
the house like it used to. He thought of the scuffle that had broken out when they had come
back from the bazaar. Pari panicking. Shrieking. Uncle Nabi quickly whisking her away. Abdullah
dug until his fingers struck metal. Then he maneuvered his hands underneath and lifted the tin
tea box from the hole. He swiped cold dirt off the lid.

Lately, he thought a lot about the story Father had told them the night before the trip to Kabul,
the old peasant Baba Ayub and the div. Abdullah would find himself on a spot where Pari had

once stood, her absence like a smell pushing up from the earth beneath his feet, and his legs
would buckle, and his heart would collapse in on itself, and he would long for a swig of the
magic potion the div had given Baba Ayub so he too could forget.

But there was no forgetting. Pari hovered, unbidden, at the edge of Abdullah’s vision
everywhere he went. She was like the dust that clung to his shirt. She was in the silences that
had become so frequent at the house, silences that welled up between their words, sometimes
cold and hollow, sometimes pregnant with things that went unsaid, like a cloud filled with rain
that never fell. Some nights he dreamed that he was in the desert again, alone, surrounded by
the mountains, and in the distance a single tiny glint of light flickering on, off, on, off, like a
message.

He opened the tea box. They were all there, Pari’s feathers, shed from roosters, ducks, pigeons;
the peacock feather too. He tossed the yellow feather into the box. One day, he thought.

Hoped.

His days in Shadbagh were numbered, like Shuja’s. He knew this now. There was nothing left
for him here. He had no home here. He would wait until winter passed and the spring thaw set
in, and he would rise one morning before dawn and he would step out the door. He would
choose a direction and he would begin to walk. He would walk as far from Shadbagh as his feet
would take him. And if one day, trekking across some vast open field, despair should take hold
of him, he would stop in his tracks and shut his eyes and he would think of the falcon feather
Pari had found in the desert. He would picture the feather coming loose from the bird, up in the
clouds, half a mile above the world, twirling and spinning in violent currents, hurled by gusts of
blustering wind across miles and miles of desert and mountains, to finally land, of all places and
against all odds, at the foot of that one boulder for his sister to find. It would strike him with
wonder, then, and hope too, that such things happened. And though he would know better, he
would take heart, and he would open his eyes, and walk.

Three
Spring 1949

Parwana smells it before she pulls back the quilt and sees it. It has smeared all over Masooma’s
buttocks, down her thighs, against the sheets and the mattress and the quilt too. Masooma
looks up at her over her shoulder with a timid plea for forgiveness, and shame—still the shame
after all this time, all these years.

“I’m sorry,” Masooma whispers.

Parwana wants to howl but she forces herself into a weak smile. It takes strenuous effort at
times like this to remember, to not lose sight of, one unshakable truth: This is her own
handiwork, this mess. Nothing that has befallen her is unjust or undue. This is what she
deserves. She sighs, surveying the soiled linens, dreading the work that awaits her. “I’ll get you
cleaned up,” she says.

Masooma starts to weep without a sound, without even a shift in her expression. Only tears,
welling, trickling down.

Outside, in the early-morning chill, Parwana starts a fire in the cooking pit. When the flames
take hold, she fills a pail with water from Shadbagh’s communal well and sets it to heat. She
holds her palms to the fire. She can see the windmill from here, and the village mosque where
Mullah Shekib had taught her and Masooma to read when they were little, and Mullah Shekib’s
house too, set at the foot at a mild slope. Later, when the sun is up, its roof will be a perfect,
strikingly red square against the dust because of the tomatoes his wife has set out to dry in the
sun. Parwana gazes up at the morning stars, fading, pale, blinking at her indifferently. She
gathers herself.

Inside, she turns Masooma onto her stomach. She soaks a washcloth in the water and rubs
clean Masooma’s buttocks, wiping the waste off her back and the flaccid flesh of her legs.

“Why the warm water?” Masooma says into the pillow. “Why the trouble? You don’t have to. I
won’t know the difference.”

“Maybe. But I will,” Parwana says, grimacing against the stench. “Now, quit your talking and let
me finish this.”

From there, Parwana’s day unfolds as it always does, as it has for the four years since their
parents’ deaths. She feeds the chickens. She chops wood and lugs buckets back and forth from
the well. She makes dough and bakes the bread in the tandoor outside their mud house. She
sweeps the floor. In the afternoon, she squats by the stream, alongside other village women,
washing laundry against the rocks. Afterward, because it is a Friday, she visits her parents’
graves in the cemetery and says a brief prayer for each. And all day, in between these chores,
she makes time to move Masooma, from side to side, tucking a pillow under one buttock, then
the other.

Twice that day, she spots Saboor.

She finds him squatting outside his small mud house, fanning a fire in the cooking pit, eyes
squeezed against the smoke, with his boy, Abdullah, beside him. She finds him later, talking to

other men, men who, like Saboor, have families of their own now but were once the village
boys with whom Saboor feuded, flew kites, chased dogs, played hide-and-seek. There is a
weight over Saboor these days, a pall of tragedy, a dead wife and two motherless children, one
an infant. He speaks now in a tired, barely audible voice. He lumbers around the village a worn,
shrunken version of himself.

Parwana watches him from afar and with a longing that is nearly crippling. She tries to avert her
eyes when she passes by him. And if by accident their gazes do meet, he simply nods at her,
and the blood rushes to her face.

That night, by the time Parwana lies down to sleep, she can barely lift her arms. Her head
swims with exhaustion. She lies in her cot, waiting for sleep.

Then, in the darkness:

“Parwana?”

“Yes.”

“Do you remember that time, us riding the bicycle together?”

“Hmm.”

“How fast we went! Riding down the hill. The dogs chasing us.”

“I remember.”

“Both of us screaming. And when we hit that rock …” Parwana can almost hear her sister
smiling in the dark. “Mother was so angry with us. And Nabi too. We ruined his bicycle.”

Parwana shuts her eyes.

“Parwana?”

“Yes.”

“Can you sleep by me tonight?”

Parwana kicks off her quilt, makes her way across the hut to Masooma, and slips under the
blanket beside her. Masooma rests her cheek on Parwana’s shoulder, one arm draped across
her sister’s chest.

Masooma whispers, “You deserve better than me.”

“Don’t start that again,” Parwana whispers back. She plays with Masooma’s hair in long, patient
strokes, the way Masooma likes it.

They chat idly for a while in hushed voices of small, inconsequential things, one’s breath
warming the other’s face. These are relatively happy minutes for Parwana. They remind her of
when they were little girls, curled up nose to nose beneath the blanket, whispering secrets and
gossip, giggling soundlessly. Soon, Masooma is asleep, her tongue rolling noisily around some
dream, and Parwana is staring out the window at a sky burnt black. Her mind bounces from one
fragmented thought to another and eventually swims to a picture she saw in an old magazine
once of a pair of grim-faced brothers from Siam joined at the torso by a thick band of flesh. Two
creatures inextricably bound, blood formed in the marrow of one running in the veins of the

other, their union permanent. Parwana feels a constriction, despair, like a hand tightening
inside her chest. She takes a breath. She tries to direct her thoughts to Saboor once more and
instead finds her mind drifting to the rumor she has heard around the village: that he is looking
for a new wife. She forces his face from her head. She nips the foolish thought.

Parwana was a surprise.

Masooma was already out, wriggling quietly in the midwife’s arms, when their mother cried out
and the crown of another head parted her a second time. Masooma’s arrival was uneventful.
She delivered herself, the angel, the midwife would say later. Parwana’s birth was prolonged,
agonizing for the mother, treacherous for the baby. The midwife had to free her from the cord
that had wrapped itself around Parwana’s neck, as if in a murderous fit of separation anxiety.
In her worst moments, when she cannot help being swallowed up by a torrent of self-loathing,
Parwana thinks that perhaps the cord knew best. Maybe it knew which was the better half.

Masooma fed on schedule, slept on time. She cried only if in need of food or cleaning. When
awake, she was playful, good-humored, easily delighted, a swaddled bundle of giggles and
happy squeaks. She liked to suck on her rattle.

What a sensible baby, people said.

Parwana was a tyrant. She exerted upon their mother the full force of her authority. Their
father, bewildered by the infant’s histrionics, took the babies’ older brother, Nabi, and escaped
to sleep at his own brother’s house. Nighttime was a misery of epic proportion for the girls’
mother, punctuated by only a few moments of fitful rest. She bounced Parwana and walked her
all night every night. She rocked her and sang to her. She winced as Parwana ripped into her
chafed, swollen breast and gummed her nipple as though she was after the milk in her very
bones. But nursing was no antidote: Even with a full belly, Parwana was flailing and shrieking,
immune to her mother’s supplications.

Masooma watched from her corner of the room with a pensive, helpless expression, as though
she pitied her mother this predicament.

Nabi was nothing like this, their mother said one day to their father.

Every baby is different.

She’s killing me, that one.

It will pass, he said. The way bad weather does.

And it did pass. Colic, perhaps, or some other innocuous ailment. But it was too late. Parwana
had already made her mark.

One late-summer afternoon when the twins were ten months old, the villagers gathered in
Shadbagh after a wedding. Women worked with fevered focus to pile onto platters pyramids of
fluffy white rice speckled with bits of saffron. They cut bread, scraped crusty rice from the
bottom of pots, passed around dishes of fried eggplant topped with yogurt and dried mint. Nabi
was out playing with some boys. The girls’ mother sat with neighbors on a rug spread beneath
the village’s giant oak tree. Every now and then, she glanced down at her daughters as they
slept side by side in the shade.

After the meal, over tea, the babies woke from their nap, and almost immediately, someone
snatched up Masooma. She was merrily passed around, from cousin to aunt to uncle. Bounced
on this lap, balanced on that knee. Many hands tickled her soft belly. Many noses rubbed
against hers. They rocked with laughter when she playfully grabbed Mullah Shekib’s beard.
They marveled at her easy, sociable demeanor. They lifted her up and admired the pink flush of
her cheeks, her sapphire blue eyes, the graceful curve of her brow, harbingers of the startling
beauty that would mark her in a few years’ time.

Parwana was left in her mother’s lap. As Masooma performed, Parwana watched quietly as
though slightly bewildered, the one member of an otherwise adoring audience who didn’t
understand what all the fuss was about. Every now and then, her mother looked down at her,
and reached to squeeze her tiny foot softly, almost apologetically. When someone remarked
that Masooma had two new teeth coming in, Parwana’s mother said, feebly, that Parwana had
three. But no one took notice.

When the girls were nine years old, the family gathered at Saboor’s family home for an early-
evening iftar to break the fast after Ramadan. The adults sat on cushions around the
perimeter of the room, and the chatter was noisy. Tea, good wishes, and gossip were passed
around in equal measure. Old men fingered their prayer beads. Parwana sat quietly, happy to
be breathing the same air as Saboor, to be in the vicinity of his owlish dark eyes. In the course
of the evening, she chanced glances his way. She caught him in the midst of biting into a sugar
cube, or rubbing the smooth slope of his forehead, or laughing spiritedly at something an
elderly uncle had said. And if he caught her looking at him, as he did once or twice, she quickly
looked away, rigid with embarrassment. Her knees began to shake. Her mouth went so dry she
could hardly speak.

Parwana thought then of the notebook hidden under a pile of her things at home. Saboor was
always coming up with stories, tales packed with jinns and fairies and demons and divs; often,
village kids gathered around him and listened in absolute quiet as he made up fables for them.
And about six months earlier, Parwana had overheard Saboor telling Nabi that one day he
hoped to write his stories down. It was shortly after that that Parwana, with her mother, had
found herself at a bazaar in another town, and there, at a stall that sold used books, she had
spotted a beautiful notebook with crisp lined pages and a thick dark brown leather binding
embossed along the edges. Holding it in her hand, she knew her mother couldn’t afford to buy
it for her. So Parwana had picked a moment when the shopkeeper was not looking and quickly
slipped the notebook under her sweater.

But in the six months that had since passed, Parwana still hadn’t found the courage to give the
notebook to Saboor. She was terrified that he might laugh or that he would see it for what it
was and give it back. Instead, every night she lay in her cot, the notebook secretly clutched in
her hands under the blanket, fingertips brushing the engravings on the leather. Tomorrow, she
promised herself every night. Tomorrow I will walk up to him with it.

Later that evening, after iftar dinner, all the kids rushed outside to play. Parwana, Masooma,
and Saboor took turns on the swing that Saboor’s father had suspended from a sturdy branch
of the giant oak tree. Parwana took her turn, but Saboor kept forgetting to push her because he
was busy telling another story. This time it was about the giant oak tree, which he said had
magic powers. If you had a wish, he said, you had to kneel before the tree and whisper it. And if
the tree agreed to grant it, it would shed exactly ten leaves upon your head.

When the swing slowed to a near stop, Parwana turned to tell Saboor to keep pushing but the